Chicago rap star Queen Key succeeding on her terms, with a feminist mindset

Parrish Lewis

Chicago rapper Queen Key

Chicago rapper Queen Key (Parrish Lewis)

Tara MahadevanChicago Tribune

Chicago’s newly crowned rap star Queen Key relaxes into a booth at Mikkey’s Retro Grill in Hyde Park, cooly flicking her eyes up and down a menu while everyone is at her beck and call — for good reason. Key’s name is hot right now — the 22-year-old with the sharp-edged, singsong style has been tasked with leading the next wave of Chicago rap and like any good ruler, she does it with panache and unparalleled attitude.

Just after Key orders, a man sticks his head through the drive-through window of the hangout spot co-owned by Chicago rapper Mikkey Halsted and shouts “Queen!” Everyone jumps except Key, who tosses her long, blonde hair aside, a smile spreading across her face as she greets him. The man is her manager Halsted’s brother, and at Mikkey’s Retro Grill, she certainly is royalty.

Emblazoned across the front of her turquoise, cropped t-shirt in yellow, pink, and blue are the letters EMP, short for the explicit depiction of oral sex that is the title of her debut studio EP. Though it follows a succession of three mixtapes — 2016’s “Your Highness” and “Beauty In A Beast,” and 2017’s “Your Highness 2” — EMP is her breakthrough, an outspoken, no-holds-barred project where she owns herself (“My way or the highway” she raps on “My Way”) and her sexuality.

Born Ke'Asha McClure, Queen Key bounced around south suburbs like Hazel Crest, Country Club Hills, Homewood, Dolton, Flossmoor, Markham, and others for most of her childhood. Because of that, her family life was fairly insular, spending most of her days “doing hella music just for fun, like with my five siblings.”

She picked up rapping with her older brother when she was seven, using a keyboard with built-in beats to make a mixtape. Even then, she already knew who she was — and the essence of her music was the same. “I was just sayin’ hella (stuff), I was sayin’ I was snappin’, I ain’t got time for no hatin’, at least a little bit of appreciatin’,” she says.

But this iteration of her rap career didn’t last long. “I stopped,” Key says. “People don’t even understand this: I’m shy as hell and for some reason, people don’t even believe me. I’m real to myself.”

Over the course of the next few years, she would pursue rap and quit multiple times before it stuck. In eighth grade, she picked it up again in 2009 when she and a friend started a YouTube channel. They made freestyles and songs, and recorded prank calls. Key took a break from it when she started high school, only to revisit the channel when she was 15, when she and her friend started smoking weed. “We got to freestyling — just making beats with our hands” During that time, she adopted her first rap alias as Baby Niko, taken from her mother’s friend Miko who “was raw to me,” Key says.

She stopped once more but this time, at the end of high school. “I just be writing, naturally, and I just was having a lot to write about, and I was just having a lot of time on my hands, and like regular (things) wasn’t working out. So I just accepted the fact that I was raw,” she says, throwing her head back with a laugh, describing how she wrote songs, poems, plays, and stories.

Throughout that time, she made many attempts to be “a regular, civilized person,” which meant getting a job at the American Girl store in Water Tower Place or at a Buffalo Wild Wings. But she kept getting hired and fired for laughing, for being disobedient, for being herself. She enrolled at Prairie State College in Chicago Heights for a short time before she “walked out,” she says, adding, “I knew I was going to be famous.”

So in 2015, she took the moniker Queen Key and that same year, released her local breakthrough hit “Baked as a Pie,” which later landed on her debut mixtape “Your Highness.” The following year, she connected with Halsted after sending him a direct message on Twitter. The two automatically clicked and in 2017, Key signed to Machine Entertainment Group.

In the video for “Baked as a Pie,” Key lays out her trademark phrase “Queen S---,” proof that her world hinges on women. In the video we see her mobbing with her girls, men relegated to the background. Her laconic manner paired with the song’s lean production gives way to the track’s title, to the hazy camera shots, with echoes of EMP’s ethos alive, even three years ago.

That brand of girl power reverberates throughout her videos. In the visual for the King Louie-supported, EMP cut “Toes Out,” men are present, but the real focus is again Key and her crew of women. The same goes for the video of her remix of Chicago rapper FBG Duck’s “Slide,” where a demure cameo from Chance the Rapper plays second fiddle to Key’s charisma and her ubiquitous girl gang.

Overall, Key takes a feminist approach to EMP, where she makes demands of men like male rappers traditionally make of women. And while this tactic isn’t new — think Lil Kim, Dreezy, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj — for Key, the theory is overt and present in many of her songs throughout her career; her sexuality becomes a feminist signifier. She treats men as objects on “Tell” and “Spenda Nite,” revealing the disposability of men just as men often do of women. And there’s no doubt that Key puts her play into practice: just this week she tweeted, “It’s a new day i got new money i got new hoes.”

“I notice that dudes, they just put like they homies or whatever in they videos, unless the girl is like a stripper or something. So it’s just like, why not just be with my friends,” Queen Key says. “They give me the okay, that it’s cool to be with your friends in the video, and it just so happens that those are all my friends. They was all love.”

Certainly, hidden underneath her smart quips about burning a pizza on the EMP standout “My Way” and men with shark-like teeth on the Tink-assisted EMP track “Spenda Night” is a person with an undeniably provocative, infectious, humorous and brilliant flow. Even the way she chose the title EMP was originally a joke that she put out to the Twitterverse: “I was on Twitter, and I just tweeted like … (EMP) the mixtape dropping 2018,’ and then people started just going crazy,” she says. “It was just like a real uproar.”

Each song on the release is brattier, tougher, and more candid than the last — and still, while songs like “My Way” are standouts, almost every song deserves the same description, particularly the anthemic, Dreezy-featuring “Ha,” the extremely blunt opener “Am I Wrong” and the effervescent “Toes Out.” But then, there are cuts like the Cuban Doll-supported “Miss 100k,” which is a captivating slow burn — or “Tell,” where again, Key is undeniable.

With features from King L, Tink, and Dreezy, Chicago is omnipresent on EMP, which was paramount for Key. “That’s another part of that legendary (stuff). I just know what’s up. I just know what I’m supposed to do, if I’ma be who I am, I feel like that’s a raw move,” she explains. “I got all the rawest Chicago people. It’s Chicago incorporated. It’s unity.”

The title EMP doubles for the word “empowering,” which is parroted on the cover art — a flip of a Paper magazine cover — and coupled with the word “disruptive.” From Key’s videos alone, you can tell that empowering women is foundational, and that while some might see being disruptive as unfavorable, it’s the only way she’s been able to be herself.

“(EMP) should be (empowering),” she says. “It’s for girls who actually have sense and love they self and just all for like moving forward and just prospering. It’s definitely like empowering to have somebody on the right (stuff) and (putting everyone) up on game.” She continues, “It’s really just me kicking (people’s) heads off. It’s just like don’t (mess) with me. I’m just really being me. It’s a part of me, a piece of me.”